Every application I use daily is scriptable. My OS is scriptable. My shell is scriptable. My text editor is scriptable. I hate to be negative, but I call BS.
Do you use scripting on your smartphone or tablet?
The death of scripting
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Re: The death of scripting
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's talking about how scripting is less and less possible on Mac/Windows, and practically im possible on phones, which is where the bulk of computing will be done in the future.
> scripting is less and less possible on Mac/Windows [citation needed]
One of the first things I install in any Windows machine I'll be using on a regular basis is Python. Helps "unlock" a lot of potential from the computer (through scripting, obviously).
On Linux machines I don't have to install because it's already there :P
Re: The death of scripting
#13Utter garbage click-bait and FUD. "Scripting" in the form of writing code in high-level programming languages is not going away anytime in the foreseeable future.
That's not the definition of scripting that the article was refering to. The article was refering to automating tasks, which is usually, but not necessarily, accomplished with "scripting languages".
Re: The death of scripting
#14Every application I use daily is scriptable. My OS is scriptable. My shell is scriptable. My text editor is scriptable. I hate to be negative, but I call BS.
Do you use scripting on your smartphone or tablet?
If you're looking at your smartphone or tablet and wanting to script it, put it down and find yourself a desktop or laptop.
Edit: Smartphones and tablets are simply not general purpose computers. I don't want a desktop type OS on either my phone or tablet. I certainly don't want a tablet OS on my desktop. That defeats the purpose. Smartphones and tablets are good at certain things the require _direct user input_. If you really want a smartphone/tablet with desktop capabilities there are vendors that sell that stuff. I just can't see a need for it.
Re: The death of scripting
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's talking about how scripting is less and less possible on Mac/Windows, and practically im possible on phones, which is where the bulk of computing will be done in the future.
History lesson: It never was possible on 3270 smart terminals, either. We've had a shift back to centralized data storage and processing. There were a few decades - the 1980s & 1990s & 2000s - where the canonical master of a data set might have been local to the user, but cloud computing has moved data back to DCs for centralized storage & processing. And we are using very smart terminals.
Even in those years, the client/server model was the norm. Except for people using MS Access, or similar fiascos, there was always a centralized data store.
That doesn't invalidate the claim that scripting is dying. Sure, us tech folk can (and do) script all kinds of things, even even more so the Enterprise IT world, who practically lives and dies by powershell. But back in the 90s in particular, there were such a thing as "power users", who would script the crap out of their systems. That really doesn't exist so much anymore. Now people in that grey area between end users and the coders are more likely to be professional business analysts. The days of a true end user also creating their own custom scripts to merge data and functions from disparate apps is getting rare.
(Keep in mind, HN is an entire community of edge cases... of course we all can spit out exceptions to this trend.)
Now, I do not think this is a bad thing. On the contrary, most of those people were very hard to support, and the ones who did it well and were easy to support often ended up moving into IT/Analyst roles anyway. I think we are in a better place today, with a much larger population of coders and analysts, so the end users can just tell us what they need, then focus on the actual jobs.
But the claim that end user scripting is dying... Yep, I do agree with that much.
Re: The death of scripting
#16Scripting isn’t dying, it’s doing great.
For example, every competent system engineer needs to be comfortable with scripting, bash/ksh/zsh on *nix, power shell and vbscript on windows.
I don’t know what kind of application is the author talking about, and what kind of support does he need. Here on windows I can automate things just fine. Some apps, like all OS components, web browser, ms office, visual studio, and photoshop have their own APIs exposed, documented and supported. For other apps I can use OS-provided UI automation API if I need to. In addition, the industry has shifted towards open file formats and network protocols. This makes possible to process other app’s data in a way that was impossible in the early days of that amiga’s, when most data formats were binary because performance.
Average end users ain’t doing all that things but that’s not a technical problem. Just demography and marketing. Old computers were expensive equipment targeted towards scientists and engineers. Modern computers are cheap, they’re for everyone from 5 years old to 100+ years old who use them to post selfies and watch cat movies. You cannot teach them all programming, they have better things to do with their lives.
Re: The death of scripting
#17Every application I use daily is scriptable. My OS is scriptable. My shell is scriptable. My text editor is scriptable. I hate to be negative, but I call BS.
Do you use scripting on your smartphone or tablet?
The only reason this isn't possible for most people is because the people who sell that hardware have made it difficult, on purpose.
Re: The death of scripting
#18I think scripting is alive and well. I've seen self described non-programmers do all sorts of interesting things with Excel, that I would have done with BASIC in 1981.
Re: The death of scripting
#19Utter garbage click-bait and FUD. "Scripting" in the form of writing code in high-level programming languages is not going away anytime in the foreseeable future.
That's not the definition of scripting that the article was refering to. The article was refering to automating tasks, which is usually, but not necessarily, accomplished with "scripting languages".
Then that's still very, very easy and doable with the Windows Task Scheduler, crontab, and many, many other applications built around task automation and orchestration.
Even in that context, the article is a pile of fear-mongering horse shit.
Re: The death of scripting
#20Scripting is experiencing a huge resurgence, just look at the prominence of Lua in the ML community.
Never thought writing WoW ui add-ons would prepare me for a 6 figure job.